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They say evidence is mounting: Dorchester is the new Brooklyn
By adamg on Sat, 09/21/2013 - 12:31pm
Lower Dot counts the ways, even has a little quiz to see if you can tell which photos are from which 'hood.
No mention of Jehovah's Witnesses (headquartered in Brooklyn), though, and still no equivalent of 770 Eastern Parkway. Also, no roller coaster or 24-hour bagel places.
Neighborhoods:
Ad:
Comments
Right
New Brooklyn as in Brownsville and East New York, for the most part?
Jehovah's Witnesses
The Kingdom Hall of the Jehovah's Witnesses is on Parkman Street in Dorchester.
Breaking!!!!
And JP is the new Peoples Republic of Cambridge
What ridiculousness
considering Brooklyn has more people than all of Boston.
The Jehovahs have been
The Jehovahs have been selling their DUMBO headquarters over the past 5 to 10 years and moving themselves up to Dutchess County.
As a resident of Brooklyn, I can't help but think, "Who cares?" Why can't Dorchester just be Dorchester? Why does everything have to be the "next Brooklyn." Don't get me wrong, I love it here, but Brooklyn is a bit overrated.
Hipster Paradise
Isn't Brooklyn increasingly populated with Caucasians from the Midwest? Are there any native New Yawkahs left?
There was even a blog dedicated to the angst the hipsters have fostered in the borough:
http://diediehipster.wordpress.com/
Once you get out of the
Once you get out of the hipified, gentrified areas of Brooklyn it's really a fascinatingly diverse place. People always talk about the Queens melting pot, but Brooklyn can't be that far behind. All of this makes for terrific restaurants and fantastic grocery shopping options.
We live in "brownstone" Brooklyn, which I think is just about the most boring part of the borough. I'm not from the midwest, though, just Western Mass, which to you people is about the same thing :-).
New Yorkers in Brooklyn
Oy Vey! Are there ever native New Yorkers in Brooklyn who are not hipsters. My family has good friends who live in Sheepshead Bay. Ashkenazi represent!
So which is it? "Dorchester
So which is it? "Dorchester is the new South End or "Dorchester is the new Brooklyn"?
How people can keep peddling this crap is beyond me.
Dorchester is Dorchester. It is a large neighborhood with several significantly different sub neighborhoods. It isn't some carbon copy of some other famous and more gentrified neighborhood elsewhere. So knock off trying to label it as someplace it isn't and never will quite be.
two things
"hey look i saw a guy with PBR, we must be hip!!"
and, named one of the ten best boston neighborhoods... unless you are including metro boston, exactly how many neighborhoods are there? obviously if all of dorchester is one neighborhood, you are not using smaller classifications. being in the top 10 is not all that exciting
It was a misleading claim anyway
if you follow the link, it goes to a list of the top ten neighnorhoods for cheap rent. Not a bad thing by any means, but it's only one measure of many that should go in to a best ranking.
East Boston is Boston's
East Boston is Boston's Brooklyn. Dorchester is Queens.
Yeah!!! Except um...no.
Have you been to any of these places? Eastie is a fine place in many ways but it's no Brooklyn. Sorry, but it's not even Queens.
PS
It may, in it's own quirky way, be Staten Island.
No thank you
I hope not. The Brooklyn I remember was a hotbed of race riots. Yusef Hawkins getting lynched in Howard Beach, a watermelon thrown at Al Sharpton in Bensonhurts, blacks and West Indians attacking Orthodox Jews in Crown Heights. No thank you.
Erm...in case you haven't studied up.
Boston's had its moments. And I'm pretty sure that Marky Mark was still beating up on black kids and Vietnamese over in dorchester during the Yusuf Hawkins era.
Marky Mark wasn't a thug in a vacuum
I know his family. No angels but not racist scum either. Believe me if a white kid got caught in a black neighborhood back then he was getting jumped.
Not saying he was
Just pointing out that Dot (and Boston as a whole) wasn't some kumbayah-singing haven while Brooklyn burned. Similar issues in both places.
Yep
What do you think will happen to a lily-white Cambridge hipster if he ends on some random H-block street after dark? Racism is alive and well on both sides of the fence.
Howard Beach
Nitpicking, but Howard Beach is in Queens.
Fair to nitpick
And Yusuf Hawkins was murdered in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. It was a separate hate crime that happened in Howard Beach.
Eastern Parkway
There's a congregation Lubavich in West Roxbury. Maybe all of Boston is the next brooklyn. :P
anyway - agreed with others that the Brooklyn as hip-identifier comparisons have gotten annoying, but there is no longer any stigma (among young educated people) associated with living in Dorchester.
The only neighborhoods left that people seem to scoff at are hyde park and mattapan - and in both cases it's more that they're "too suburban."
I used to live in Hyde Park.
I used to live in Hyde Park. No one ever used the term "too suburban". Instead "isolated" comes to mind. There are actually several suburbs with better T connections to downtown and the Back Bay.
Other complaints about Hyde Park include the lack of decent retail stores. Also there's a plethora of businesses that open and close in the blink of an eye. Break ins are becoming more common, and there is gang activity especially in the Wood Ave and Ross Playground areas.
There are Chabad centers,
There are Chabad centers, well, everywhere. That doesn't make everywhere the next Brooklyn.
I'm pretty sure Dorchester
I'm pretty sure Dorchester would rather just be Dorchester.... I mean, who wants to pay $2200 a month to live in a dive apartment in Dorchester? (When you could pay that and live in Brooklyn. Or, apparently, Somerville.) Why do people in Boston constantly compare themselves to New York City? I think Boston would be wise to stop looking to NYC for the bar, and start setting it themselves.
People do
Ever heard of Lower Mills, Jones Hill, Savin Hill, Polish Triangle, Neponset, Popes Hill, etc? Problem is, they're just small parts of Dorchester, mostly either east of Dot Ave or bordering Milton, while a major portion of it is still a crime-infested cesspool and won't be changing for the better any time soon. Saying all of Dorchester is a shithole is rather silly, but saying all of it is the new Brooklyn is even more so.
Nope
Next Brooklyn might end up being in Jackson and Egleston Square area, assuming the next mayor grows a pair and knocks down Bromley Heath and Academy, replaces the current cesspools with mixed income housing, keeps the working families and boots the generational welfaroids to Lawrence and Brockton.
Did anyone actually read the blog post?
Or just spout off defensive comments depending on which side of the fence you lean?
The post is pretty good. I think points 6 & 8 are a bit of a stretch but the overall concept is fair. I take issue with #6 because our restaurants aren't quite at the level of Brooklyn. Regarding # 8, there are few bikes here and neither brewery actually brews commercial amounts in the neighborhood they are named after.